Im 1200 elo and feel like having to push in deer in order to meet these new tighter build orders has made the early game significantly less fun and just frustrating sometimes. The deer can just randomly not work and sometimes spawn behind wood lines. Not only that, it just doesn’t feel as good as it used to when the majority of players didnt touch the deer. Don’t think I would have ever picked up this game in the first place if this was a part of the meta when I started playing. Feels so tedious and stressful. Messing up the early game is way easier to do now and way more consequential if you do mess up. I know it well never happen but it would geniunely be a better game if deer were just not in Arabia.
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At 1200 elo whether you push deer or not in your build order doesn’t matter at all, though.
The highly optimized build orders the pros use are, you guessed it, meant for the pros. Or well, just higher level players.
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Do we have another ‘expert’ here telling us ‘noobs’ that nothing we do matters because we’re crap anyways? It would be funny if it weren’t so sad and frustrating.
I think my advice would be just not to push in dear if you don’t enjoy that aspect of the game. You’ll drop 100-200 some ELO, and you’ll get a disadvantage in the early game, but because you’ll be facing weaker players you’ll be able to come back in castle/imp by doing whatever you do well.
If you can abuse good scouting, (because your scout won’t be pushing deer,) you might even drop less than 50 ELO.
(I do actually enjoy pushing deer myself)
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That is a huge exaggeration. At ELO 1300-1400, I don’t remember losing a single match due to not pushing deer (=being too slow up or having too few res at the same uptime). If games end early, it’s usually either some hole in wall kind of thing or misjudging the game (over or underinvesting in feudal army or caught out of position).
Conversely, there is just no way I would rise 100-200 ELO just by starting pushing deer.
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For fast Feudal strategies:
You can totally ignore Deer if you are not going to advance from Dark age with fewer than 20 villagers. You have to push Deer only when you advance faster than that, like with 18-19 vills.
For fast Castle strategies:
You can easily build a Mill next to Deer while still in Dark age, no necessity to push Deer, and problem solved again.
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What? I’m saying the margin for errors is way larger on lower ratings, because chances are if you execute your build order perfectly, you may not have trained other areas of the game as well. Ultimately deer pushing is a minor decision that only pros really manage to leverage into faster uptimes.
Pushing your deer isn’t going to jump you up 100 if not more points in rating, or not pushing the deer tanking it by same amounts, when both players are low rated. That’s not me saying ‘nothing the low rated players matters’. In general, I’d just avoid highly specialized build orders at this level anyway. If you’re not confident in executing it well (such as if a build order requires deer luring and you struggle with it), don’t do it.
The meta is just becoming quicker and quicker. That seems the best way to win games at high levels, so on lower levels people try to copy that.
But you dont win by just executing a build order smoothly. There is much more needed.
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Dont whine. Adapt and do your own shit like a real G
I only push 1 deer and leave the other 2. Earlier walls. Im doing fine. 1250 elo.
We can practice if you want. Ill show you my build. I dont like the mandatory 3 deer push either. I only do that if im opening skirms and playing defensive.
If im attacking early i scout after the first deer
1,3k ELO here. I was doing 19 vill into archers and I had an extremally slow aging time in compare to my opponents, which means I was late with army too and quickly changed my eco in mess and GG.
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Disagree heavily. Once you are comfortable with pushing your deer early you should go for the super fast buildorders the pros use, there’s almost no downside to it, especially on lower elos than maybe around 1600 where drushes are very uncommon.
With these fastetr buildorders it’s important you don’t make the eco upgrades as early, as you will need the res income to make military at that stage. So you need to be comfortable with not getting the eco upgrades as early as you used to. But weirdly enough it turned out, it’s not that bad to delay the eco upgrades a bit as long as you remember to get them when you have the res to your disposal.
With the current hunt for timimngs there is this transitional phase after the initial rush where you have a few res but it will still take a while to get up to castle, this is a nice timimng to get the eco upgrades. Horsecollar can sometimes even be delayed until you clicked up to castle.
I thik the main factor which causes this is that you don’t lose much eco when going up earlier to feudal and castle. It’s about equivalent to 50 res collected per vill for feudal and about 70 for castle. That’s very little considering what the timing advantage can offer you. Before the deer pushes at least when going up to feudal early had the downside of a bad food economy, as placing farms is costly. with the about 350 extra food you get from the deer you can make 7 more vills time to setup your farming eco, which allows for these super fast BO.
Importan is to find the deers fast and start pushing them in as soon as possible, you want to eat as less sheep as possible at this stage. Especially if you open archers where when you eat more than 2 sheep you usually have even too much food in feudal which you can’t use effectively.
Maybe you should accept that there are also some player who prefer adaption IN THE GAME and utilizing the tech tree more over sheer execution of the standard rushes.
There needs to be a balance between the different playstyles and it looks atm the executional meta is heavily dominating the ladder. Whilst I don’t have anything against people preferring that playstyle, I don’t think it’s good for the game it’s curretnly in that state.
Maybe you made some executional mistakes. Load some pro games and compare there decision to yours.
Like when you make your eco upgrades, vill distribution, when stopping making military, walling, how fast you are in adding farms… all this kind of stuff.
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One thing I want to mentio is that in my opinion the currently heavily executional focussed meta for me produces less enjoyable pro games, esepcially on arabia.
The games are super snowbally because when both players chose that executional playstyle the one who gets a disadvantage early often has no real comeback options. As the advantages often aren’t “decisive” the games are unnecessarily lengthy for what actually happened and unejoyable to watch, cause yeah… you know what will happen.
I currently enjoy more watching the Arena torunament than KotD tbh.
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It wouldn’t be the official forums if these types of comments weren’t made. 
Not even using words like “i think” or “possibly”, this man knows without a doubt it would be a better game if it had such a big eco shift.
No suggestions like “make deer spawn more reliably or closer”, “genuinely” removed is the better option
Which is why I said, if you’re not comfortable with pushing deer, don’t do it. Lower elos may end up messing up their build altogether when compared to a more generic no-deer-pushing build order they can execute reasonably well. They’ll be up maybe one vill later, but who knows - with deer pushing they may have made their eco a complete mess that they’ll be up way later than opponent regardless of what the opponent does.
Once you get better at the game, you can do all of this and thus execute the more optimized build orders better and make use of their advantages.
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this is what happens when the maps are 1-dimensional and extremely predictable
you don’t have to explore. you can’t fish. you just push deer.
farming = 
Tight Build orders are overrated imo.
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I guess its based on playstyle and civ preferences. If you like the defensive playstyle, you can wall and go a bit slower and skip the super early up time. Its not mandatory to have a very fast uptime.
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I dont think you understood my post. Im not advocating to do the tight meta. You can succed with different builds at lower elo levels (under 1500)
At 1200 you can ignore all deer and still win trust me
pushing deer while managing the early eco is not that easy for >1500 elo players.
it could happens that, in order to push the deers, you lose a vill to the boar, or you kill it with TC arrow.
or maybe you aren’t that fast in pushing all 3 deers, so when you finish the job you are almost feudal age and you have not found your opponent yet. So basically you lose the timing advantage you got by the faster build order.
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Counter suggestion - learn laming and drush.
Laming and drush counters deer pushing very well.
Has deer push meta already arrived at “mid” elo? (Which is actually weird, cause it refers usually to like 1200-1600, but from the design “mid” should actually mean around 1k elo…)
I know taking deer is meta, but i assume that they either push 1-2 when going up as they have then confidence in it (therefore we also see a lot of scout play there) or just take it with or without a mill like liereyy used to.
I’m also not convinced that drushes “counter” deer pushing. It’s only that the super tight buildorders which are often associated with it take more damage from a simple drush.
And laming… come on, do you really expect 1200 players to be able to lame without losing more than getting for it? Be serious.
And I also think the players at this elo range shouldn’t be pushed to learn this kind of strats, they should actually be more encouraged to learn the depth of the game and utilize their different options, not winning by disadvantaging the opponent early on.
It’s that range where you finally should be comfortable enough with the basic openers that you can actually start “plaing the game”. And people should be encouraged to do so.
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